


a stone's throw away

by CanIHaveAHug



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drabble, Hurt No Comfort, Suffering, Torture, utterly pointless pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 10:58:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanIHaveAHug/pseuds/CanIHaveAHug
Summary: One day, as Madara returned home from the river, he realized he was being followed, and he looked back....That was a mistake.





	a stone's throw away

 There is an air of grief and hopelessness that hangs heavily in the air, and Hashirama is drowning in it.

Madara pauses at the edge of the tree line, observing his friend with some strange itch in his shoulders. He thinks he remembers seeing Hashirama like this before. He remembers  hunched shoulders and a quiet weight of loss that had been so familiar to him, that had drawn him in like moon does a young coyote, allured by fascination and deep instinct.

But no. This was not like that time. This was… aimlessness. And rage, tangled up in raw, throat-tearing sorrow.

(He thinks he knows why.)

_(He shouldn’t have looked. He shouldn’t have looked back, shouldn’t have asked questions, but-)_

In the end he shakes off his nerves and approaches the bowl-headed boy with a flippant greeting.

“Yo, Hashirama,” Madara says shamelessly, as though it were just another day.

(He knows it’s not. Who is he trying to fool?)

Hashirama doesn’t reply for a long time. And then-

“Uchiha,” he returns tonelessly.

 

\---

 

“My brother was sent to follow me. Then you. Did you kill him.”

Hashirama’s voice is a flat hush. Low and hard and quivering like a powder-filled keg.

Madara feels like a cork has been stuffed down his throat, sealing everything inside him like a bottle. He can’t answer. He can’t swallow. He can’t breathe.

“He had white hair and red eyes, _did you. KILL. HIM._ ”

( _Pale hair filthy and pressed flat by sweat, blood-red eyes blistering with defiance, even while tear tracks carved pale paths through the grime of the boy’s face._

_(Purple and black bruises decorating the small body in such thick consistency it looked as though dipped in liquid shadow. Viscous ribbons of blood dripping down a back torn to shreds._

_(Senju’d been too stubborn to be successfully interrogated by genjutsus, it’d seemed. An impressive feat, for one so young-_

_(But it’d called for less elegant measures._

_(They hadn’t worked either. Yet.)_

_(He knows they’re getting close though. He’d finally heard the boy scream under his uncles’ cruel, tender care a few days ago.)_

_(It was odd though, he’d thought in a distant corner of his mind, that the boy’d been forced to wear a gag.)_

_(Or perhaps, another part murmurs, it makes perfect sense. After all, his uncles never had been as interested in interrogation as they were in ‘interrogating’ Senju Butsuma’s son.)_

So no. Madara had not killed Senju Tobirama, second heir of Senju clan, last brother of Senju Hashirama.

 _But perhaps_ , Madara thinks—

—faced with the trembling of an unearthed mountain, with the hitched gasps and hisses of unconfirmed betrayal, with the fragile flicker of hopeless hope in angry, beseeching brown eyes—

— _it’d simply be better if I had_.


End file.
